Posted
by
Unknown Lamer
on Tuesday April 30, 2013 @05:07AM
from the burn-it-with-fire dept.

An anonymous reader writes "German IT magazine Heise reports (original in German) that the Ministry of Education in Schwerin had a Conficker virus infection on 170 machines, that was dealt with by simply throwing them on the trash. Other German authorities have now decided that 'the approach taken is not up to the principle of efficiency and economy' and that the 187,300 Euro invested in this radical form of virus removal were inappropriate. The ministry had earlier estimated the cost of cleaning their desktops and servers by more conventional means to 130,000 Euro."

Install Linux. Cost $0 + admins' time -- almost certainly less than trying to remove and clean infected systems.

Forget about virus infections for the near future.

They already had licenses to the Windows installations so the cost equation would be the same, it only differs if you assume they would try to clean the infection and not simply install Windows after format c:

What the [admin's time] factor expands to is another thing, and hardly favors the GNU/Linux approach. If the idiots are dumb enough to throw out new PCs because of a virus infection, they most certainly are too dumb to install anything but Windows.

Eh? For imaging use PXE with Partimage, or FAI (if you want a non-imaging solution better suited to non-standardised hardware). With Linux on the server side you can manage Windows AND Linux deployments, plus lots of other stuff (groupware, dns, dhcp, phone, netfiltering, filesharing, kerberos along with HEAPS of other stuff not as relevant to an educational context). If you want a GUI integrating all that just use GOsa or FusionDirectory or any number of other LDAP + service management front-ends. It's

Not to mention that the 130k probably includes the cost of preventative action to stop this happening again. Much easier and quicker (therefore cheaper) to start from scratch with a new security baseline than try to impose one after the fact.

Got a client at the moment discovering the very same home truth right now with something rather less virulent that Conficker running wild on their network. That'll teach them how "optional" AV update subscriptions are.

Not to mention that using something like Clonezilla they can re-image the whole network of PCs provided through PXE (pixie) boot.

Seems that my country is not alone in employing the stupidest morons they can find for jobs in the departments/agencies/institutions that the state controls. Waste of money and waste of human resources in a time when unemployment for young people is soaring.

Have you seen the work that came out of that? The GUI frontend to it all is called GOsa (although there's a fork called FusionDirectory which I prefer). The whole infrastructure is managed via LDAP plus RPC, and allows deployment of Linux and Windows (via FAI and OPSI respectively). There are also a multitude of plugins for managing a multitude of network services and LDAP stored info. I use it for managing DNS, DHCP, groupware (SOGo), web proxy + filtering (Squid), Samba, windows OS + software deployment (OPSI), Linux + software deployment (FAI), Debian/Ubuntu repo management, centralised logging (rSyslog)... and I'm currently looking into connecting it to Asterisk. There are TONS more plugins.

And many organisations are still stuck on Windows XP with apparently no plan or ability to switch in the near future despite EOL gone flying by and EOS approaching rapidly.

But this is like an organisation that decided to transition to WinXP when it was new, and are still in the process.

So what's your point other than that a massive infrastructure change is hard?

There needs to be a point besides that very important one? People paint switching to Linux as if it's an easy option. It's not, it's and incredibly long and frustrating process. And most people will would wish they never started.

But this is like an organisation that decided to transition to WinXP when it was new, and are still in the process.

Well, no.

XP debuted in 2001. Munich didn't even start discussing it until 2003. Votes were passed in mid 2004, and shortly after the project was halted for non technical reasons. They started planning in 2005 and then did a pilot test to see if it was worthwhile and feasible.

The actual migration started in 2006, the same year as Vista came out, at which point the migration started piecemeal at

Install Linux. Cost $0 + admins' time -- almost certainly less than trying to remove and clean infected systems.

Forget about virus infections for the near future.

Of course the admins time probably adds up to about $300 per machine.

Seriously, I can completely believe this story because it would probably take someone at least an hour to clean the PC. It is also quite easy to believe that a government department or big company who outsourced their IT would be paying more per hour for technical staff than they would for a new PC.

This is especially true if you asked the IT outsourcing company to provide a cast iron assurance that the virus was removed with some sort of penalty clause if their was a reinfection. The quote you would get back would be prohibitively expensive because the any company with any sense would run a mile from providing such a ridiculous guarantee.

All of sudden what sounds like a 5 minute job to someone with some technical skills and has a 99% success rate has become such a headache to the bean counters that demanded a 100% success rate that they decide throwing the machines in the bin is actually cheaper. Of course this is ridiculous, but I have heard of things far more ridiculous when government middle management gets involved in IT decisions.

In public sector management you hardly ever get rewarded for things coming in under budget like you do in the private sector but you get torn to shreds if anything ever goes wrong so the whole thing ends up being ridiculously risk averse in the extreme.

Why would you sit and stare at a computer while running virus removal tools. Move on to the next computer. This is a very common virus with pre-made tools available to remove it from several vendors. Just start it running on 100 computers at a time - just as fast as you can run and type.

All you have to do is get one computer fixed reliably. Then just make sure you do the same thing to the others. It's not like you have hundreds of totally unique infections.

ps. I doubt your secretary can tell which OS they're running in the first place

Then you're an idiot. Just because someone doesn't understand technology doesn't mean they don't know when their menu items are in different places or when the nice obvious icon they had becomes some in-joke about Klingons.

ps. I doubt your secretary can tell which OS they're running in the first place

Then you're an idiot. Just because someone doesn't understand technology doesn't mean they don't know when their menu items are in different places or when the nice obvious icon they had becomes some in-joke about Klingons.

secretary: OK. so what do you mean that "this new ribbon bar is all you need"? Where'd my "print" menu go???

You may laugh but for as much as most AAs can't tell you a mainframe from a stick of RAM they certainly do know their way around the software that they've been using for over a decade. So as much as some of us like to pat ourselves on the back for being nerds and geeks, these people can make your head spin when it comes down to using your basic office suite apps. This isn't to say that they couldn't be retrained for another office suite but there would be training involved and their productivity would suffe

1200 viruses? I think you're exaggerating. Maybe you're counting some variants of the same "virus" - like several times each. I don't know the exact number, to be honest. I do know that I was repairing damage due to exploits on Windows monthly. When I switched to Linux, I stopped repairing computers, until hardware broke.

How many millions of viruses are available for Windows now? So few virus writers support Linux . . . *sigh*

Here's a number that will blow your mind:

"At day’s end on April 12, for example, Symantec published the summary shown below, noting that its latest Virus Definitions file contained 17,702,868 separate signatures."

You already knew that - but did you read the article? That was my challenge to AC - those millions of Windows viruses can be reduced by an order of magnitude. Ditto for his claim of 1200 Linux claims.;^)

> There a more than 1200 Linux viruses. That notion of yours is bullshit.

I have ran Linux as my primary desktop for over ten years, never run an anti-virus, never got infected.

> And you are forgetting costs to teach your average secretary how to use Linux + New Software licenses + migration costs.

Are you forgetting how radically different Win8 is from previous versions of windows? And, unlike iTunes or other proprietary garbage, there is no 79 page license you have to sign for Linux. As to migration c

Or do use Red Hat as it will still be cheaper.If Windows were free I would still prefer Linux, just for the licensing.All the different licensing takes up my time. Quite a bit of it.With the crap I have to go through for viruses, licensing, updating, and basic windows problems I spend a lot of time that I would not have to with linux.I have 3 Linux servers, 2 SCO Unix Servers, 2 Windows 2008 servers, 1 Windows 2003 Server, 34 Windows XP machines, 2 Vista Machines, 1 Windows 7 Machine, 1 Ubuntu PC and 4 Lin

Are you sure?Yeah, many do run, but at what cost. There's a plethora of software which can't integrate at all with the Metro (or whatever it's called) functionality. Amazingly, in the tiled UI you can't even read what time it is, only the date. If you want to use Yahoo Messenger, you have to drop to Desktop mode. Daemon Tools? Desktop mode. Avast antivirus? Yeah, Desktop mode. Chrome, Firefox, Opera? Ever-the-fucking-desktop-mode! This is valid for a vast majority of existing (and popular!) Windows applications. And it's been what, 6+ months since Windows 8 got live and most popular application makers have no plans to create tiled apps for Windows 8. So much for 100% compatibility.

Just as I hate having to use terminal on a Desktop Linux OS, I also hate having to drop to Desktop mode 10 times an hour to do the stuff I usually do. That makes the tiled side of Windows, no matter how colorful, useless and annoying. You switch to Desktop mode to use your browser, then back to Tiled mode to look for a setting, then back to Desktop mode to do this, then back to Tiled mode to check weather, then back... for fuck's sake. It's an OS with two GUIs. RE-TAR-DED.

It is just an evolution of the Windows product line, not a radical departure from it.

It is a half-baked piece of shit, and that comes from someone who used Windows since... well, 3.1 and tried hard to use Windows 8.

What would be the mountains of garbage and how empty the purse in this country, if that would make anyone like that? Schwerin Ministry of Education made with 170 virus-infected computers, leaving them short shrift unceremoniously throw in the trash. The State Court of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern has carried out the initial purchase of 170 computers now reprimanded. "The approach taken is not up to the principle of efficiency and economy." € 187,300 cost of the new equipment and installation services to taxpayers.

The seemingly insurmountable pest, the computer of the teacher training institute (IQMV) in Schwerin, Rostock, Neubrandenburg and Greifswald was seized in September 2010, was the Conficker worm . In addition, the computer should have been more affected by some other viruses, such as the Ostsee-Zeitung reported first.

As the Court in its report criticizes for 2012, the Ministry of Education have had "no IT security concept" and established the new purchase with "faulty IT equipment". Further explanation and evidence remained the Ministry guilty. It "could [...] not state whether the IT systems of the IQMV were actually affected the extent mentioned above. Protocols of anti-virus software could only be provided for the location of Greifswald, despite repeated requests, which, however, no massive fund of was to remove viruses at the relevant time. "

In addition, the Department did not properly consider how costly cleaning the computer had actually been. The Ministry of Education guess the cost of cleaning initially to around 130,000 euros. The cost of 152,300 euros for an already registered for the fiscal years 2010/2011 published by new acquisition in a different light. The additional costs for installation were estimated at around 35,000 euros. Thus, the Ministry decided only to clean the affected server and otherwise replace all systems.

I don't know if you ever deployed Windows on more than one machine at a time, but my last upgrade from scratch roll-out of 25 machines to Win 7 and Office 2010 took 8h, half of which was dealing with 2 older machines with "compatibility issues" and with a legacy printer. Win XP took more running around and hitting the "restart" button for the updates, but the total time in front of a machine was still less than 15 min. For most machines the longest time was manually typing in the license codes.
To me the

Conficker.... suddenly it becomes clear. I know an organisation that was infected, and they ended up spending 2 weeks with a Microsoft consultant to clear everything up. The problem is that it spreads too quickly, so when you clear a PC and move on to the next, it re-infects the first one. Silly old Microsoft.

So, if they upgraded their PCs too.... makes perfect sense. I wouldn't have binned the old ones though, I'd have wiped the HDDs and sold them or given them away.

This thread is disappointing. So much hate. Hate leads to fear, and fear leads to the dark side.

Anyway. Conflicker. Nasty. Simple. Old. A clean up is not easy, but conflicker requires some bad baselines to be operating for it to get through and thrive. If you fix the baseline issues, the clean up can follow. A clean susyem thats updated properly isn't infectable via conflicker. So frankly a system sorted put back in should be fine. You'll obviously have to do this step by step and yes, there is a price. Most orgs this size have IT staff so I don't know how the figures are drawn up.

I also have to say, the clean up tools and detection tools mean attacking conflicker infection is on the easier end of security clean up. The story is sad because it seems to indicate ever present stupidity in public services. Advocates and supporters of public services need to understand that its not a ob creation scheme. If someone has a role or job, they must be competant. Trained. Skilled. People who are not have no place in it.

No, conflicker has worm elements. So, the hard part of the clean up is not per se an individual machine. Its that you need to solve the baseline problems that allow conflicker to do its thing.

Re-installing 'stuff' won't make this go away. Doing it wrong just reinfects the machine.So, as I said, what has to be done is the cause and baselines that allow conflicker to replicate have to be solved (harder part) - and then machines with good baselines go through clean up and go back on the network (easier part..)

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/962007 [microsoft.com]Any tech learning about conflicker can read about it, and start to understand what needs to be fixed. Patch, correct password weakenesses, stop autorun etc etc. Today, this is somewhat simple as a lot of tools and detection tools exist.

People in threat waving around Fdisk and re-install media saying 'they could fix this' - probably in fact are clueless and need to understand the problems involved. Conflicker breeds off poor security and bad baselines. Thats how it gets in. Thats how it replicates. Thats how it hangs around and re-infects.

I've built Windows XP install media with SP3 and all possible patches slipstreamed in (on DVD, but it still worked), then a supplemental CD with non-slippable updates (IE8,.NET, all that stuff). It's possible to install, offline, an XP machine with all updates applied to it in two reboots after the base install. Windows 7 is even easier since you just build a custom.wim file and replace the default install.wim with your custom one and bam. Nothing is unslippable in Win7.

The problem is that it spreads too quickly, so when you clear a PC and move on to the next, it re-infects the first one.

Then the first one wasn't really fixed, was it? Microsoft released a patch that blocks re-infection so all you have to do download that and their Malicious Software Removal Tool to a CD, disconnect each machine from the network and run them in order. Problem solved.

The high cost is probably due the cost of certifying that the infection was removed and the PCs are safe to use with sensitive data again. Removal is trivial if somewhat time consuming.

Well, you could recycle the machines and get some kind of payment if they're subsequently sold. This is what the IT guys at my company do with old machines. The disks are wiped, reformatted and reloaded with a fresh copy of Windows (by the recycler), then the machines are cleaned up and resold in a storefront. We get a portion of the selling price (wither to keep or to donate) and the folks in the community get low cost machines.

I've been trying to get my company to do this. Most of the machines we throw out are higher end Core 2 Duos that just need Windows reinstalled (if that) to bring them back to optimal. Unfortunately, the Powers that Be have decreed they have to go in the bin for a recycling company to pick them up. The end result is that we pay someone to resell our PCs that we've already wiped and don't see a dime of.

Yesterday the Conficker Working Group [confickerw...ggroup.org] saw 634 million HTTP hits on Conficker domains from 1.7 million unique IP addresses. This is seems to be a fairly static figure going on three years now.

Unfortunately, it's still very much alive and out there. The parents PC contracts it regularly (my dad has appalling security and browsing habits). A friend of mine (who I generally regard as more IT literate than I am) just spent a weekend cleaning an infection of it off his (fully-updated, Macafee-profected) Windows machine.

And now for a gratuitous side-rant:

The source of my friend's infection was apparently a minor video-hosting site carrying game-walkthroughs. On balance, I believe him on this, because I'd had warnings from AVG about such sites myself in the past.

The trend over the last few years has been for game-walkthroughs to shift from text-format to long sequences of videos. Personally, I hate, loathe and despise this trend from a convenience point of view (try searching 30 videos for how to find that pesky item you're missing, compared to doing a quick search on a text file). But it's had some other unpleasant side effects.

See by default, these videos go on youtube. Thing is, however, game publishers sometimes object to complete video walkthroughs of their games being hosted there and do DMCA takedowns. So the videos then crop up on less notable video-hosting sites. Many of which appear to be malware infested hellholes.

So the moral of my (horribly off-topic) side rant: video walkthroughs suck. They're difficult to search, they're inevitably narrated by some idiot called "Tad" who feels the need to say how stoned he is roughly every 30 seconds and - they're turning into a really horrible malware vector.

People do video walkthroughs because they're easily monetizable. I can make a video for a game and put it up on Youtube and get ad partner money. If I write a text walkthrough and put it on GameFAQs I'm pretty sure I get exactly $0 forever. If I try to host it myself and put ads on my site, it's likely no one will ever read it because people will just go to Youtube, GameFAQs, or the game's wikia site if it's popular enough to have one.

It sucks, but that's how it is. Expect more video walkthroughs in the fut

Look at the stats. The old ones never really go away. They just get overshadowed by the newer ones. A little bit of trickery is also done with counting variants as separate malware. Anything to keep the stats down.

I think its one of these cases where they're locked into a service contract for the PC they bought, and its easier to bring forward an upgrade than let the service company rip them off. The translation says they'd almost fully depreciated the PCs anyway, so they were several years old anyway.

So now some party (no doubt connected to the service company) is kicking up a stink because they didn't get to rip them off.

For half of that money I'd fucking take a first class plane trip to Germany, pay for my own hotel, and be done reimaging their PCs over a workweek. That includes deploying whatever they need deployed on those PCs, and leaving a solution in place to reimage them at will. And that's all being quite green when it comes to Windows administration. At work I really only do the minimum needed not to need to muck with it.

I wonder how the estimated 760 euros when I've done similar things, which has taken less than 15min of my time. When I was in IT, an all out infection just meant a computer getting re-imaged, which I could start remotely.

Process to re-image a computer

1) Call end user, ask when they won't need their computer for 1 hour
2) Start re-image remotely
3) Restore data/setting/installed software, which was all automated and part of the re-image process

It's not the Ministry of Education of whole Germany, but of the german State of Mecklenburg, which threw away the PCs after a virus infection.

And there is more to the story: It was estimated, that the cleaning of the PCs would cost ~135,000 €, and a replacement, which was planned anyway, would be 190,000 €, thus they decided to replace early instead of spending the 135,000 € on the clean-up and throw the PCs away a year later.

That's making the assumption that they have the man-hour resources to clean up the infection themselves. Likely, they aren't well enough staffed to just divert the number of people needed to cleaning up the PCs in a reasonable amount of time.

This. And they didn't have any disaster recovery planning or any kind of security concept in place. And this was the main reason why the Board of Audit chastised them: Not even after a big failure of IT infrastructure any planning to avoid similar situations in the future.

That's making the assumption that they have the man-hour resources to clean up the infection themselves. Likely, they aren't well enough staffed to just divert the number of people needed to cleaning up the PCs in a reasonable amount of time.

they got some sort of cio on payroll. he's got all week for this. if he's unresourced for this, he could have bought the resources for a lot less than 800 euros per hour - even in germany. their staff is going to be spending the same time setting up the new computers as well.

Still, 135K€ for cleaning a bunch of PCs...what did they do, piss off the resident BOFH? Did someone make a lewd comment to IT about their jobs being outsourced to the 'cloud' that week? 'Tis the kind of prices you pay after you insinuate that someone's parents were blood relations...to their face...and then proceed to draw them a diagram outlining family relationships to ensure that there's no chance of a misunderstanding.

Okay. They'd spend 1.350.000€ on cleaning, because the contractor cleaning those would happen to be a son-in-law of the chief of the agency and successfully charge for ten times the work. Then they'd spend the 190.000€ on new hardware a year later and throw the cleaned PCs out anyway, and pay another 1.000.000€ on consulting fees on how to buy these to the same company.

Welcome to corrupted as hell Southern Europe. This is pretty tame to stuff that actually happens there. Worth noting that Ire

I guess they simply multiplied the cost of virus removal with the number of machines. But it only takes once to find the source of the problem, the remaining 169 machines could've been fixed at minimal cost after that. And of course, it doesn't cost a cent to just wipe them all clean.

Assuming generic medium skilled German IT guy's fully burdened cost is $168,000 USD/yr and that this level of effort will require a staffing change (both very good assumptions)

Let's say this medium skilled IT guy gets a €3000/month salary, that's €36,000/year. There will be other costs, but it won't come anywhere near the number you assumed. Also, dealing with malware is a standard task when managing Windows desktop PCs, no matter whether you blame it on market share or on Microsoft. So if it requires a staffing change, then they didn't have the right staff to begin with.

$168k for a technician? Fully loaded in Europe, you're probably looking at about $40k for a full loading on tech resource necessary to diagnose and fix this kind of problem.You don't necessarily need config control to do a fix, though that would likely entail one later on through the sysops and change control processes worked into the standard working day.There are so many inconsistencies and erroneous assumptions in that post that it really did give me a chuckle.

The traditional art of Dumpster diving plus a Windows or a Linux install would have saved these machines from their fate. If they were scheduled for replacement, then I'm sure some charity or educational establishment could have benefited.

The traditional art of Dumpster diving plus a Windows or a Linux install would have saved these machines from their fate. If they were scheduled for replacement, then I'm sure some charity or educational establishment could have benefited.

There are many establishments which could have benefited here, but there are two issues with that - first, the machines would have to be sanitized so there is a guarantee that no confidential information is stored on them (90% of government IT disposals ignore that rule, but the Germans are actually among the best at following it); and second, I am pretty sure that the majority of recipient organisations would say "no thanks, we cannot handle the clean-up" if an organisation said "here you go, have 170 PCs

This happened in 2010.Those were old computers.They already had the money to buy replacements budgeted in their 2010/2011 budget.

So they had to decide to pull the effort the reimage everything for a couple of months, or just buy the new ones early. Buying the new ones early did cost a bit more (30k for all of them), but less then a cleaning would have cost.

The servers, who where not sheduled for replacement, were reimaged just fine.

I can't quite imagine a business of that size not having a system in place to reimage machines at will. At one place I work we have two dozen machines and I'm well underway in having them all PXE boot into an imager which then either boots the existing image from the hard drive or updates it prior to booting. Once I finish shaking down the test deployment on a few machines, it should be ready to go. Users have had roaming profiles for years now so that's not an issue.

This happened in 2010.
Those were old computers.
They already had the money to buy replacements budgeted in their 2010/2011 budget.

So they had to decide to pull the effort the reimage everything for a couple of months, or just buy the new ones early. Buying the new ones early did cost a bit more (30k for all of them), but less then a cleaning would have cost.

The servers, who where not sheduled for replacement, were reimaged just fine.

This happened in 2010.
Those were old computers.
They already had the money to buy replacements budgeted in their 2010/2011 budget.

So they had to decide to pull the effort the reimage everything for a couple of months, or just buy the new ones early. Buying the new ones early did cost a bit more (30k for all of them), but less then a cleaning would have cost.

The servers, who where not sheduled for replacement, were reimaged just fine.

How dare you inject reason and facts into a/. arguement? You're supposed to say Windoze Bad Linux Shiney Free and accuse anyone with a different view of being an MS shill or troll. Replacing rather than cleaning is the right thing to do, it would have been more fiscally irresponsible to clean and then replace, and no doubt under German law the old ones were recycled rather than just dumped in the trash.

given that reimaging would involve more than simply pushing out a new image but would need machines to be offline to avoid reinfection, there is also productivity losses and associated costs as well.

There's only so many times you can lather, rinse and repeat in a given time period before someone points out that you're insane.

Some folks might think I'm saying switch to Linux instead of just creating a fresh patch of systems to be virused. Smarter folks would realize that VMs with automated image rollouts would be a much better (and even OS agnostic) investment in the long run.

Is that PC hitting public facing stuff, or does it allow users to bring their own data? Then it should be hosted via VM then unless you're focusing on 3D graphics applications.

Next time they do a Hardware upgrade, you just roll out the VMs again and save virtually all the "support" cost of the rollout. Pays for itself after one or two upgrades. Doubly so if you've got a nasty malware infection since you already have the re-imaging process in place. With hardware supported virtualization standard now, it's kind of dumb to even not be using it...

The ministry of education of the federal state Mecklenburg-Vorpommern acted in the illustrated way. Mecklenburg-Vorpommern is a small state in the north east of Germany. The central auditing authority of that state (Landesrechnungshof) recalculated the effort and determined that the cost of the early replacement due to a virus infection was too expensive considering the alternatives.

The German ministry of education is placed in Berlin (which is also a federal state having its own minitry of education) and called "Bundersministerium für Bildung und Forschung" (engl. Federal Ministry of Education and Research).

...how often do we get to make fun of Germany for making a boneheaded decision regarding technology? I say we savor this one for years to come, as stories like this are a dime a dozen over in the States.

Its school right? They have students right? While I don't think it would be good to go down the path of using what should be instructional hours to do maintenance on the school this one seems like there would be ways.

I have to assume there are some computer science, computing for business, personal business type courses where doing some operating system installs would be defensible as providing "useful background." So a couple class periods from those courses the students could be borrowed for the purpose

Actually given the IT admin at the school I went to, throwing out the computers would of been the better option. This guy was pretty clueless, it took him three months to figure out how to reload command.com on a machine and install Windows, someone did a del *.*

The original article is on the German federal state Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, which is a small state in the north east of Germany. It is not the central government in Berlin. I can understand if people find that confusing. However, there are 16 federal states. Every one of them has a ministry of education.

Furthermore, the German government replaced Windows for Linux in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but after the election of the present government, they changed it back, because they are conservative and neo-liberal and do not like this commie Linux stuff. Officially, they determined that the other Ministries were not able to share documentation, because the Ministry of Foreign Affairs used ODT and they used DOC. The fun fact here, ODT is mandatory for all government documentation (but obviously only on paper not in reality).

Now that would explain why Germans had this "cash for clunkers" program where they mandated that EVERY committed car had to be physically destroyed, instead of being shipped to Africa, where it could still have worked 20+ years. This has always struck me as incredibly selfish and petty, like some young child which would destroy its used toys rather than give them to other children.